


spinning as she sprawls

by haipollai



Category: Captain America (Comics)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Race Changes, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-03-08
Updated: 2014-03-08
Packaged: 2018-01-15 01:41:24
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,807
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1286455
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/haipollai/pseuds/haipollai
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>(Who is Bucky? He snarls at a man that has been labeled an Enemy and the Winter Soldier doesn't know or care why.</p>
<p>In the blue light of the cube his answer comes in flashes of blood and laughter and death and love, of a skinny boy who didn't look like anyone else and hated everyone because of it.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	spinning as she sprawls

James Buchanan Barnes was born in Haifa, the son of a British officer and Palestinian woman. He speaks Arabic with her and English with him. When Bucky's five they move to Egypt where the boys at school make fun of his accent. His English is too foreign and his Arabic is too provincial. His skin is too much like his mother's. Nothing about him is quite right.

So he learns to throw a punch instead. By the time he's seven his father has gotten sick of him getting into fights and sends him back to England to boarding school.

He still gets into fights for not being like the other boys and insists on writing all his letters to his mother in Arabic. But his English sounds like everyone else's.

He goes back to Egypt each summer and clings to her skirts to hear her laugh until she's killed. Bucky's told it was a mugging gone wrong. He doesn't go back to Egypt after that. His father returns to England with his little sister, but he doesn't see them much either. Not until a car veers off the road and hits him.

Bucky realizes then how small his family really is.

When he's fifteen, the SAS recruit him from boarding school. We need someone like you, they say. Your father gave us your name, they say. Around them the world descends into war.

They train him, he learns to control the anger inside him better. He learns how to wield a knife with both hands and take apart a gun blindfolded. They're pleased he's bilingual, and encourage him to learn Russian and improve his schoolboy French. To even pick up German. (He's never told anyone but he likes languages. He likes trying to shape the different sounds. They come as easy as throwing a punch.)

He still writes to his sister in Arabic.

When he's sixteen he's introduced to Agent Margaret Carter. Your handler, they tell him. She takes him out dancing where they end up in a dark corner and she tells him she doesn't like this assignment. He's too young for what is too come. His instinct is too bristle, lash out and defend himself but he realizes she doesn't mean it personally.

Instead he asks what is to come.

Peggy smiles tightly around the lip of her gin and tonic. Her lipstick leaves a stain on the glass. "This war is going to be won with science, not attrition."

They leave three weeks later for New York City, it's different than the other places he's been. The brick of the buildings creates an artificial warmth that doesn't rival his old home in Cairo. He resists running his fingers through the cracks of mortar as Peggy leads him to an antiques shop in Brooklyn. They had given him files on Abraham Erskine and Howard Stark and a skinny man named Steve Rogers.

They stop outside the shop and Peggy squeezes his shoulder. She must look like an older sister to any passers by. Do you understand why you're here, she asks. Bucky likes her, she doesn't talk down to him, doesn't tease him when he slips into Arabic accidentally. He hopes she doesn't mutter the same insults behind his back everyone else does.

He tugs at the dog tags around his neck, liking their weight. "I'm next." To ensure the free sharing of information in the fight against Hitler. To make sure the Americans aren't the only ones with a super soldier army.

Bucky watches from beside Peggy as skinny Steve Rogers steps into what looks like a coffin and steps out bigger, stronger. For the first time he's scared.

Peggy leads him downstairs to be introduced to Colonel Phillips and Corporal Rogers and the doctor when everything goes up in flames.

-

"They want to make you my partner." Steve stands outside the makeshift boxing rink some of the men on base have set up. Bucky takes part for some quick cash and to keep himself sharp while they decide what to do with him. Peggy keeps him informed between her own duties.

But Steve comes up to him with the final verdict.

"I can't keep up with a super soldier."

Steve gives him a small smile and explains he doesn't want a double of him out there. He wants someone with Bucky's skills.

Two months later, Bucky finds himself on a boat back to England, Steve's hand warm on his back as they watch Lady Liberty disappear into the haze.

-

It's Namor who points out Steve's interest to Bucky while they're in France. Bucky had noticed the way Steve's looks lingered but he assumes it's distrust and annoyance at being saddled with some kid that Steve is too polite to ever express out loud.

Bucky tried to spend more time with Toro, he flirts with Peggy when they're by base. Anything to keep him away from Steve, to keep Steve from realizing what a mistake taking Bucky to war. (He still has nightmares of that first battle, of the way his gun burned in his hands, knowing the bullet it had fired had cut through another living man's stomach.)

Namor rolls his eyes when Bucky tells him it's not interest, it can't be. Except Bucky starts looking back until their eyes meet and Bucky has flirted enough to know that look. He doesn't often see it directed at him, not by men who look like Steve. 

Steve's skin looks even lighter when pressed to his own and Bucky expects him to say it's a mistake or a one off. But Steve isn't one to do that to anyone and Bucky knows that, has worked and lived and fought with him long enough. Steve kisses the scars left over from years of fights. Years of anger and wounded pride and condemnation. His kisses aren't to wipe that away, just acknowledge.

Bucky remembers clinging to his mothers skirts, listening to her stories spin out into elaborate tales around him. He remembers running around with other boys in Haifa and Egypt, before they learned of his father, when it didn't matter.

Things are easy with Steve at his side. Even as he becomes jaded with war, and used to the feel of a gun in his hands or a knife in his boot, things with Steve stay easy.

Bucky knows it must be too good to be true.

-

(Who is Bucky? He snarls at a man that has been labeled an Enemy and the Winter Soldier doesn't know or care why.

In the blue light of the cube his answer comes in flashes of blood and laughter and death and love, of a skinny boy who didn't look like anyone else and hated everyone because of it.)

-

Bucky hears the gym doors open and hangs loosely from the pull up bar, letting himself hang upside down so he can see who it is. Being there in the Avengers tower makes him nervous. There's no forgetting who he was or what he did before the programming was broken.

"You're not what I expected."

He recognizes her easily. Carol Danvers aka Captain Marvel, Air Force liaison to SHIELD and the Avengers. He knows more too, about alcoholism and how she's not as human as she pretends. "What did you expect?" The blood is starting to rush to his head so he pulls himself up just in case there's a fight.

His hair falls into his eyes, thick and dark even after a haircut to get off most of the overgrowth that developed while he was forgotten in a warehouse.

"You're American in the comics."

He laughs sharply. He's gotten used to it mostly, all the references to that stupid comic. Only one issue had his skin color right, the very first. The publishers wrote him a letter saying that the people didn't want to see that, they wanted to see their own sons out there in the good fight, doing the right thing.

"Is that a problem, Yank?" He puts on his most posh English accent, sneering on the last word. He became good at that as a boy, stuck into boarding schools with the rich and pompous.

"You're also an asshole."

He shrugs and drops to his feet, he's been called worse. "I like to think I'm allowed that."

A small smile tugs at her lips. "Yea, I guess you are."

He waits for something else, a snide remark, a backhanded accusation that others have been quick to throw at him, but nothing comes. Maybe he judged her too quick.

"Steve likes you a lot."

His name settles between them. An accusation and a question tangled together. Bucky doesn't know how to explain, doesn't know if he has the right. He could tell her about Steve being one of the few who treated him as an equal, about stolen nights in tents, about something like belonging. But nothing comes out. All he can do is shake his head in mild awe that Steve is still there and refuses to abandon him to the wolves.

-

He didn't like mirrors before, they only reminded him of how different he was. That he didn't look like the boys he went to school with, or the men who trained him. That his face had to be changed for people to think of him as a hero. He doesn't like them now because they only reflect back his scars. Especially the worst one around his shoulder, marking the line between warm skin and hard metal.

Let me, Steve asks, pushing him gently into bed. Always so careful on Bucky's skin. As if he's made of the charcoals Steve loves to draw with and a wrong touch will ruin the image. Write your favorite word, Steve whispers.

Bucky is careful, it's been a long time since he's had to write in Arabic instead of only speak it. (The Soviets took advantage of his darker skin and his first language and he knows his actions have led in part to the news he sees today.) He doesn't know if he has a favorite word but he has a word he wants to be his favorite, that he wants to believe in before his own betrayals and sins drive him crazy.

He checks and double checks before he hands the small scrap of paper to Steve.

Steve uses blue paint, biting his lip as he goes, making sure not to make any mistakes as he paints on the inside of Bucky's metal arm. But Steve has steady hands.

He doesn't ask what it means until he's done, with Bucky's head on his chest, his arm held up to let the paint dry.

Hope.

His cheeks flush, feeling self conscious but Steve doesn't say anything. When the paint is dry, Steve presses a kiss to the word.

-

 


End file.
